LOT Winter School 2004, Amsterdam

[Pfau, R.]

Dear List members,

this is to inform you that at the 2004 LOT Winter School, to be held at the University of Amsterdam from January 12th to 23rd, a one-week course on "Generative approaches to sign language structure" will be offered.
The course will take place in the first week of the winter school, i.e. from January 12th to 16th.

Below you'll find some general information on LOT Winter/Summer Schools as well as specific information concerning the course on sign language structure.

For further information concerning LOT, other courses offered at the 2004 Winter School, course readings for the sign language course, and registration please visit the LOT web page at
http://www.lotschool.nl/GraduateProgram/graduate.htm
and click on "graduate program".

Best regards,

Roland Pfau

*********************************
Dr. Roland Pfau
Assistant Professor
Dept. of General Linguistics
University of Amsterdam
Spuistraat 210
1012 VT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

tel. 0030-(0)20-5253022
r.pfau at uva.nl
*********************************


LOT Summer and Winter Schools

LOT organises, and is principally responsible for, the national graduate courses. LOT offers a Winter School in January and a Summer School in June/July. The topics of the courses in part are determined by general considerations, and in part reflect the main research topics of the organising institute/group. The selection further reflects the number of graduate students working in specific areas, and the interest shown by the students in recent years. 
Each School offers a maximum of 18 courses in a program of two weeks. Courses consist of 2.5hr sessions on 5 consecutive days. A course may be completed by writing a paper. LOT-students can qualify for a so-called LOT-certificate specifying that the student has fulfilled the requirements of the LOT-curriculum. These two-week course blocks are hosted in turn by the participating institutes/groups. 

Course: Generative appraches to sign language structure
Instructor: Roland Pfau (r.pfau at uva.nl)
Course level: Intermediate
Course description:
Extensive research in the last, say, 30 years has convincingly demonstrated that sign languages (SLs) have complex grammatical structures. Moreover, it has been shown that - despite the use of another language modality - these structures can be accounted for by the same formal apparatus that has been developed for spoken languages. That is, on an abstract level, there is no need to refer to modality-specific representations or principles. 
So far, most of the research on the grammatical structure of SLs - if it is embedded in any framework at all - has been done within the framework of Generative Grammar. As far as phonology is concerned, it has, for instance, been shown that signs consist of segments which in turn are made up of hierarchically organized distinctive features. On the syntactic side, it has been demonstrated that SL sentences can be represented in a hierarchical phrase structure consisting of lexical and functional projections and that movement operations are subject to the familiar constraints (e.g. subjacency, head movement constraint).
In this course, we will have a look at a number of aspects of SL grammar that have recently been accounted for within different theoretical models, namely Optimality Theory (OT), Distributed Morphology (DM), and the Minimalist Program (MP). Note that with respect to these models some background knowledge is required (although not necessarily with the latest versions; see 'Preparatory readings'). Familiarity with the structures of SLs, however, is not assumed. In order to provide students with the necessary background knowledge, the first day of the course will be devoted to a brief introduction to SL linguistics. Since we will focus on those issues that are relevant to the topics of the next four days, the first day is also relevant for students with background knowledge in SL linguistics.
On day 2, OT approaches to SL morphophonology will be discussed. Here we will be dealing with reciprocal constructions in German SL and with the role of markedness constraints in the realization of agreement. On day 3, we will turn to some SL phenomena that have been described using ideas of DM; these are classification (in SL of the Netherlands) and agreeement (in American SL). Problems concerning universals of phrase structure will be addressed on days 4 and 5. On the one hand, it will be shown that wh-questions in SLs (e.g. ASL and Indo-Pakistani SL) pose a challenge to a proposed universal concerning the position of SpecCP; on the other hand, we are going to discuss the hierarchical organization of functional projections (using data from ASL, Brazilian SL, and German SL).
Day-to-day-program:
Day 1: Introduction: a crash course in sign language linguistics
Day 2: Sign language morphophonology and Optimality Theory
Day 3: Sign language morphosyntax and Distributed Morphology
           (together with Inge Zwitserlood)
Day 4: Wh-movement and the position of SpecCP
Day 5: Hierarchical phrase structure and functional categories




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